Lawyers Getting fried for Double Dipping

The new trend in art sales are lawyers who want to control a deal, get commissions and know who buyer and seller are. The breech of ethics is enormous. Who are they representing?

Per state bar regulations, lawyers in the United States are supposed to get paid for their time. Billable hours.

The idea they can write in a commission incentivizes them to line their own pocket and not advocate on behalf of their client. Stone aged yes, but it avoids conflicts of interest.

Representing their client is sacrosanct to the ethics of the bar. State bars vary, but the underlying concept does not.

When a seller of a major painting retains a lawyer to oversee a transaction, those same bar regulations require said lawyer insures a safe sale with minimum liability to seller, and not the lawyer getting onto the field to become a player by collecting a commission.

Johnny Depp: A Star in Crisis and the Insane Story of His "Missing" Millions

What happened to $650 million? An explosive legal battle between one of Hollywood's best-paid actors and the business managers he fired has laid bare tumultuous finances, outrageous spending and troubling behavior on Disney's new 'Pirates' movie in a case that could even change how the industry does business. Early one afternoon in October 2012, Jake Bloom and Joel Mandel left their respective Beverly Hills offices, slipped into their luxury cars and embarked on the roughly 30-minute journey to the Hollywood Hills compound of their client, Johnny Depp.

Bloom was a rumpled and graying lawyer whose disheveled style camouflaged an intellect exercised on behalf of such luminaries as Martin Scorsese and Sylvester Stallone. Mandel, then in his early 50s, was a tall, rather amiable accountant who favored loose-fitting jeans and looser-fitting shirts, sartorial code designed to assure his clients he was just another boy in their band as well as a top-flight business manager steeped in the arcana of arbitrage and amortization.